News, Commentary and Insights from the Flash Player and AIR Product and Engineering Teams

Posts in Category "Articles"

Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of the Adobe® AIR® 2.6 SDK and AIR® 2.6 desktop runtimes for Windows, Mac and Linux. With AIR 2.6, AIR achieves feature parity for Android and iOS platforms. This new release provides major performance and feature enhancements for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) app development as well as updates for Android and desktop app development.

“Adobe AIR 2.6 enables me to develop once and publish across multiple platforms. There are slight tweaks required for each platform (Android vs iOS) but we’re talking about a few minutes not weeks. The majority of the optimizations revolve around screen sizes which would be an issue regardless of the development tool. If I were targeting Android and iOS natively vs Adobe AIR I would expect my costs to be at least 80% higher; and much closer to 100 – 150% higher should maintenance and updates be required for each platform.”

-Charlie Schulze, President and co-founder, Woven Interactive, LLC

Video: Watch Charlie Schulze’s demo of “Comb Over Charlie” a multiscreen app (Android and iOS smartphones, tablets and Windows laptop) developed using AIR.

New Features in AIR 2.6 for iOS and Android

AIR for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)

“I’m now getting 60 fps on an iPhone 3GS, it’s smoother than Packager for iPhone too!”

-Kevin Newman, Senior Developer, adcSTUDIO

“My project uses things like vector graphics, blend modes, and filters. In the past, many effects needed to be removed or altered for iOS to achieve decent performance. This gargantuan improvement means that I can now use the same project to target both iOS and Android. It’s likely to save me many hours of time previously spent on optimization.”

-Josh Tynjala, Founder, Bowler Hat Games

Updated AIR for iOS support with improved performance. Developers can take advantage of new features in iOS 4 like multitasking, Retina display support for higher screen resolutions, and front and back camera support. Developers can now build applications that capture audio with microphone support and take advantage of the same graphics hardware method used in AIR for Android using OpenGL ES 2 for high performance graphics.

Packager for iPhone (PFI) is now replaced with functionality integrated with AIR Developer Tool (ADT) a command-line tool for compiling applications in the AIR SDK. ADT can now be used to package AIR files, native desktop installers, AIR applications for Android and iOS.

Submit apps to be included in the Amazon Appstore for Android when the store launches. Companies now have an additional distribution option with one of the largest online shopping destinations on the web. Learn more in Christian Cantrell’s blog post “AIR 2.6 Applications and the Amazon Appstore for Android”.

USB debugging was added as an additional debugging option to WiFi. Learn more about AIR 2.6 features for mobile and desktop please read Scott Castle’s article“What’s new in AIR 2.6″.

The Adobe Developer Connection (ADC) is an amazing resource for developers looking to explore the latest content related to Adobe tools, frameworks and runtime technologies like Flash Player and Adobe AIR. With the recent launches of the Flex 4 SDK, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst CS5, and Flash Professional CS5, there is an incredible amount of new material to explore.If you have not had the opportunity to visit the ADC already, there is a dedicated section that focuses on Adobe AIR content.

Below are a few articles that are applicable to building out-of-browser applications using Adobe AIR that I would encourage you to explore:

If you have an idea for an article that you would like to see on the Adobe Developer Connection website, please leave a comment with your proposal. If you are interested in writing an article on your proposed topic, be sure to mention that in your comment as well.

As we’ve been speaking to JavaScript developers, one of the most requested features has been the ability to debug their applications. While we exposed this capability in Adobe AIR 1.5 released in November of last year and Aptana announced a beta plugin that supports this, today’s announcement is particularly exciting because the final version of this plugin is now available to users and includes many bug fixes and enhancements. Debugging support includes the ability to step in, step over, and step out of code. Errors are displayed in the Console.

It’s a must read article whether you have already deployed an AIR application to your customers or you are simply in the early stages of thinking about building an AIR application.

If you have thoughts or experiences you would like to share, positive or negative, with regard to the performance of your AIR application, please feel free to leave a comment. If you think you have encountered a bug in this area, let our team know directly by sending us a description of your issue to our wish list.

In the coming months, we plan on sharing more articles that describe how to optimize the performance of your applications.